Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America

A significant addition to the literature on early American history and culture... The most striking feature of this impressive volume is not the quality of its components but how those components relate to the central question of postcolonial theory and early American studies.

Offers such a diversity of topics, ranging from Incan witches to Roger Williams, that it will appeal to historians and literary scholars with interests throughout the Americas and the Atlantic world from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries.

'Early America' is greatly enlarged both geographically and conceptually by Possible Pasts, a richly diverse set of ethnographic studies of past life and expressive forms from both continents and the islands of the New World. The theme of 'colonization' addresses the most powerful and pervasive shaping processes in the history of the last half millennium.

An impressive collection of essays on early American history and culture... The anthology is a useful and welcome addition to historical discourse... A review this brief cannot justly convey the richness of the work. The seventeen contributors to the volume have given us a multifaceted work that draws on history, art history, folklore, anthropology, and textual analysis... The work deserves to be read, absorbed, and discussed.

One of the book's main achievements is to make important contributions to our understanding of colonial identity writ large while also emphasizing the varieties of experience in the Americas... It is a brilliant collection throughout, carefully conceived and edited, that should direct scholars of early America toward further conceptual research on the nature of colonialismand identity formation.

One of the wonderful things about good essay collections is the way in which their introductions richly overview the collection's field of study. St. George's opening essay in Possible Pasts stands as vivid testimony to just how rewarding introductory material can be... This is a collection that will richly reward the reading of a wide range of scholars, particularly those interested in postcolonial and interdisciplinary studies-whether those studies be concerned with the early Americas or not.

Possible Pasts is required reading for all historians and literary scholars interested in textual analysiscritical theory, and the cultural construction of reality, and it is highly recommended for everyone in the field of early American studies. Provocative in tone and approach, the succinctly written essays in Robert Blair St. George's volume suggest the transformative potential of the new scholarship; the very best of them advance new and exciting interpretations, particularly with respect to women's lives and gender identity.

Precisely because so much work went into it, and precisely because the essays contained here are so well-polished, Possible Pasts asks to be considered as more than another conference book... It is a bellwether for the progress, achievements, and limitations of an early American history attentive to what St. George names variously as 'recent ciritical theory,' post-structuralism, and cultural studies.